Cisco Cisco UCS Director 4.0 White Paper

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Application Infrastructure on Demand with Cisco UCS Director and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure
March 2015
A New Operational Model
More than a century ago, the combination of standardization and automation 
increased the world’s production capabilities, allowing business to generate greater 
revenue. Today, with twentieth-century data centers no longer able to keep pace 
with the rapid rate of change, data centers are in the midst of an automation 
revolution of their own. Just as in the past, standardization and automation in the 
data center can propel greater revenue for business.
The combination of Cisco UCS Director and ACI delivers standardized automation 
to the provisioning and orchestration of IT infrastructure. Standardization helps you 
reduce the number of different application profiles that you need to create by taking 
advantage of the fact that most applications fit into a small number of standardized 
infrastructure models. Self-service and automation capabilities combine to allow 
a diverse range of users to order what they need on demand and take delivery 
within minutes, eliminating the need for manual provisioning and deprovisioning 
of infrastructure resources. And the close integration of Cisco UCS Director and 
Cisco ACI delivers not only infrastructure automation but an excellent foundation for 
customers seeking to expand into more sophisticated use cases such as private 
cloud and platform as a service (PaaS). 
Introducing Cisco UCS Director
Cisco UCS Director orchestrates and automates your IT infrastructure lifecycle 
from initial provisioning to final decommissioning. It manages every aspect of IT 
infrastructure across computing, networking, and storage resources, with physical 
and virtual resources treated equally (Figure 1). Through a self-service portal, 
Cisco UCS Director provides the capability to deploy the IT infrastructure to support 
applications in private cloud environments. Cisco UCS Director:
•  Implements a process-oriented approach to infrastructure orchestration that 
automates the processes you define using built-in workflows or your own 
combination of more than 1200 built-in tasks—including tasks that tightly couple 
Cisco UCS Director with Cisco ACI.
•  Automates the IT processes necessary to accomplish infrastructure provisioning 
and decommissioning using a role- and policy-based model that limits 
administrator and client capabilities so that they can implement only infrastructure 
that complies with the policies that you have established.
•  Manages IT infrastructure orchestration and automation from a single user 
interface
•  Provisions physical and virtual computing, Layer 4 through 7 network services, 
and storage resources
•  Establishes secure multitenant environments so that clients—internal or external 
to your company—can work within the secure constraints of their own resource 
pools
•  Supports single and multitier application infrastructure profiles
•  Provides metering and showback capabilities so that your organization can be 
properly compensated for the IT services you provide
•  Supports heterogeneous data centers that have computing, networking, 
virtualization, and storage resources provided by more than one vendor